Newby request

KevinKarney

I am new to Drawbot - wishing to convert thousands of lines of code of complex animations from the venerable Nodebox 1.

Two questions

I need the option to build compound objects (with unions, differences, intersections). Is it possible to make (e.g) a torus by differencing 2 circles. Or do I have to create two bezier paths and then do the difference.
with primitives such as oval or rect, can I incorporate the fill, stroke, strokewidth, etc into the call.
In Nodebox 1, I can say (e.g)
a = rect(0,0,20,20,stroke=Red,strokewidth=3,fill=Grey, draw=False)
This creates an object call a, but does not draw it....

The sort of movies I wish to emulate in Drawbot can been seen here...

gferreira

hello @KevinKarney, welcome to DrawBot!

1. I need the option to build compound objects (with unions, differences, intersections). Is it possible to make (e.g) a torus by differencing 2 circles. Or do I have to create two bezier paths and then do the difference.

both methods are possible:

you can do it with a single BezierPath by drawing two circles in opposing directions:

x, y = 500, 500
r1 = 400
r2 = 300

B = BezierPath()
B.oval(x-r1, y-r1, r1*2, r1*2)
B.reverse()
B.oval(x-r2, y-r2, r2*2, r2*2)

fill(0, 1, 0)
stroke(1, 0, 0)
strokeWidth(10)
drawPath(B)

or you can draw two separate circles, and get the difference between them:

B1 = BezierPath()
B1.oval(x-r1, y-r1, r1*2, r1*2)

B2 = BezierPath()
B2.oval(x-r2, y-r2, r2*2, r2*2)

B3 = B1.difference(B2)

drawPath(B3)

2. with primitives such as oval or rect, can I incorporate the fill, stroke, strokewidth, etc into the call.
In Nodebox 1, I can say (e.g)
a = rect(0,0,20,20,stroke=Red,strokewidth=3,fill=Grey, draw=False)
This creates an object call a, but does not draw it....

grouping colors and geometry can be done with functions:

def a():
    stroke(1, 0, 0)
    strokeWidth(3)
    fill(0.5)
    rect(0, 0, 20, 20)

a()

hope this helps… have fun with the movies, and let us know if you have any other questions.